Fix “User Profile Service failed the sign-in” Problem in Windows 7/8/8.1

Last night when I switched on my faithful Lenovo Windows 8 notebook, it showed me a dreadful blue screen that read – “The User Profile service failed the sign-in. User profile cannot be loaded”. As if everyday life problems are not enough, you have to grapple with Windows problems too. In this case Windows was showing this screen because of some files’ corruption in the user profile. One way around this is just create another user account, but if you have something important in the corrupt user profile, then you may want to follow these instructions to fix this problem.

User Profile Service failed to sign-in

  1. Reboot in the safe mode of Windows. We have explained how to boot into safe mode multiple times on TrishTech.com. Usually, you have to quickly and continuously tap F8 key after pressing the power button in your PC, until you see the Windows Advanced Options Menu. From this menu, you can choose the safe mode.
  2. Sign-in to an administrator level account. Safe mode does not load many of the drivers to keep Windows from running into problems and errors, but you still have to sign-in to a user account. Choose a user account with admin access. You can also choose the user account with which you are having problems and see if it works in the Safe Mode.
  3. Find User Profile key in Registry Editor. Open the Registry Editor and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. You will see many sub-keys with user profiles SID’s. Identify the correct user profile key beginning with S-1-5 by checking ProfileImagePath value under that key. This value should be the user profile folder path for the correct user.
  4. Rename the security identifier (SID) for the target User Profile. After you have identified the correct key, see if the key name ends in .bak. For example, if the key name is S-1-5-XXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXX.bak, then rename it (select it and press F2) and remove .bak during renaming. However, if there is already a key without .bak as the suffix, then first rename this key and ass suffix .trisha to the key name and then rename the key having a suffix .bak and remove the .bak from the end.User Profile Service failed to sign-in
  5. Change some Registry Values. You have to change the values of RefCount and State to 0. For this just select the registry key from  which you removed .bak in step 4 above, and double-click on RefCount and set its value to 0. Do the same for the State value.User Profile Service failed to sign-in
  6. Reboot your Windows PC. That’s it. Now you can reboot and you should be able to sign-in to your user profile without any problems.
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